The real stories from inside the F1 paddock

Len Terry 1923 – 2014

Len Terry has died at the age of 91. Born in Birmingham in 1923, Terry grew up in London, leaving school at the age of 14. Initially he worked as an office boy for a theatre producer, but the war changed the course of his life when he joined the Royal Air Force becoming an instrument maker specialising in cameras that were used for aerial photography. Later he would be transferred to Karachi in pre-Partition India before being demobilised and moving to a job as a trainee draughtsman with the Ever Ready battery company in Walthamstow.

He would work as a draughtsman in various different industries in the years that followed, notably working with Professor Denis Melrose on the design of a heart-lung machine that was first used in 1957, enabling surgeons to start doing open heart surgery. At the same time he started racing in the highly-competitive 750 Motor Club world and joined forced with rivals Maurice Philippe and Brian Hart to build a Formula Junior car in the mid 1950s called the Delta. This was followed by another Formula Junior called the Moorland before Terry began to build his own Terrier cars in 1957, doing the work in the from room of his home and driving the cars himself. He then joined Lotus but he soon fell out with Colin Chapman over the Terriers. It did not help that he crashed and broke his leg. The Terriers did well in Formula Junior in 1960 with Hart driving. Terry moved to Gilby, designing first a sports car and then in 1960 an F1 car for Gilby’s Sid Green. He was then convinced to return to Lotus and became Colin Chapman’s design engineer, translating his ideas into designs and making them work. In this role he played a key part in the design if the Lotus 25 and 33 models. This was followed by the Lotus 38 with which Jim Clark won the Indy 500. He was later lured away to join Dan Gurney’s Eagle cars for F1 and Indianapolis and ultimately designed the 1968 BRM. He went on to design a BMW Formula 2 car but the project was cancelled after the death of Gerhard Mitter. At the same time he penned the Leda Formula 5000 car which would ultimately become a Surtees with much success in Britain and America. Later he would attempt a come back with the Viking F3 project and with BRM. He then returned to contract design work until his retirement.

30 Responses

Every blog I have read of yours has the merit of being thought provoking and worth reading. A combination of experience and insight your proof reading sometimes lets you down…” the project was cancelled after the death of Gerhard Mitter was killed.”
If you’d like uncritical assistance….
jcp

As a footnote, the Viking F3 car morphed into the Technic and then the CTG. I don’t think the CTG ever raced, but I believe the late Dick Parsons tested it around 1977 and for some reason the car resided in my lock-up garage for several weeks afterwards!

My dad, who died 2 years ago, worked with Mr Terry and Professor Melrose on the heart-lung machine. During the press conference when it was unveiled, dad was addressed as professor and asked where his white coat was. He laughed and said he’d just helped design it. We still have some newspaper clippings dating from that time. RIP Len and dad (Harry Park)

Joe, I possibly, nay probably, owe you an apology. The Birmingham and 1923 info may well have come from me (http://www.oldracingcars.com/teamboss/Len_Terry). I’ve now learnt, reading through Len’s life and an interview with him in 2012, that the 1923 info is wrong. He was born in 1924 – not exactly sure of the correct date, in Hackney.
I’ve changed my info and feel it only fair to let you know so your excellent blog isn’t wrong.
Sad news about Len. A real enthusiast who stood up to Chunky – not many people did.

Though this may seem a around about way of tribute, I think we lost a lifeblood in curtailing testing. It’s good to remember and pay respect to these men who literally had to be founts of knowledge and walking talking simulators of their ideas, who could make the leap from though to track, with pencil and slide rule. Even recently, we read of real difficulties translating simulation to performance, and wind tunnels being part of the problem. A good simulation is usually a linear progression, a integration of the mostly known, not a radical departure. To change significantly, you need to calibrate your simulations, and to do that, there’s no substitute for real track time, and tunnel hours reducing every year compounds the difficulty. Newey was making a serious point, about designers signing their own passing from relevance. It’s not only aero that matters, not only aero that is tested, the design within is not ballast.

The respect I have, for men such as Terry, is they embodied the very nature of racing, especially of formula one: that it was frontier, not merely a “formula” sport, but a genuine challenge of the unknown, and if ever something was too well known, it would be the Terrys of this world who would seek to redress that competitiveness reducing parity. Whilst I’ve grown up, so, arguably, has F1, and I believe it did not need to ascribe to worthy maturity, the tendency to design by rules and standardize. A year or more back, I speculated that aero components would be standardized, or could be, as a radical measure as to costs. Apparently, at least for the nose and possibly the front wing, that’s effectively happening for next year. The individual rules do not distress me, so much as the fundamental lack of freedoms.

The greatest tribute I can pay to such men, is that it’s my heart’s desire that we might enjoy again the atmosphere of the possible that great engineers promulgated through the sport, the spine tingling appreciation for the marvel of a car rolling out and firing up, and the excitement of a more direct human connection between the sweet sight and sound of speed, and a design that only the shortest while before, ticked over only in a man’s mind, or a few mens’ minds.

And he left school at fourteen… no doubt the RAF taught him, but careers were once built by application and self study. Do you need a PhD to work on a web design interface? (that had me spluttering, but it was genuinely shocking) I may get the generation labels wrong, but it seems gen x hit up their baby boomer grand parents to stay in school too long, gen y were churned out a sea of qualified youngsters starting life in debt, not infrequently to the tune of a modest home, and those coming through now… we need to remember men like Terry, for many more reasons than his contribution to racing.

I would agree with most of what your say John, but testing is not the loss that Len Terry represents. What we have lost, in is the pyramid of race car design and engineering below F1. Even when I statted out there were many firms building cars for FF1600, FF2000,F3 snd F2. Teams, constructors and Engineers could progress upwards. Now that is gone.

+1 rmm! I miss most in the sport, the different marques of the recent past. In 50 years of following the sport, it has gone from traditional makes, new makes to one makes, and one make series have killed a lot of the interest in motorsport for me.
Len Terry was an old school Engineer, and a great one too. I’m not sure that Joe is right about Leda morphing into Surtees, he may well be. However, I know that as a teenager, I used to have to go to the local Creekmoor industrial estate, to locate spares for our machines at work, and next door to one of our suppliers, was Leda, which became McRae, when Grahame McRae bought the design and used it in F5000 to good effect. After that Roger Penske bought the place, and started his F1 team from there. This would be around 1973-1976, the period I’m talking off.
Anyway, another great Motorsport Engineer gone, R.I.P, Len, great cars and great times!

In collaboration with Alan Baker, Len Terry wrote “Racing Car Design and Development”, published in 1973. The book describes what was known at the time and explains the principles of racing car design. Humankind has since invented gadgets and weird aerodynamic tricks, but the laws of Newtonian physics have not changed. Len Terry’s book remains a good foundation to understand how a car works; aerodynamics and technological tricks are just extra layers to comprehend.

According to some recent accounts of Len’s life, he was more interested in design than in racing development. I am not convinced. I don’t believe that his Terriers, racing in Clubman classes against the Lotus 7, would have been so successful if that was true.

Len Terry, like Colin Chapman and Eric Broadley, started off as a racing enthusiast and evolved into a designer. Robin Herd initially wished to design planes. Peter Connew was an industrial designer before working at Surtees and founding his short lived (but long remembered) F1 team.

Contemporary F1 designers and engineers have a narrower focus in life. There are more jobs in F1, so engineers are more likely to enter the sport at a high level without wider life and work experience. They must find racing rules to be over-restrictive and boring.

So a man who left school at age 14 was key to the design of three of the most beautiful pieces of high speed metal of all time: the Lotus 38, the Gurney F1 Eagle, and the BRM of 1968. What a definition of genius!

These beautiful creations of Len Terry remind one of the phrases of another genius of humble origin (the poet John Keats) who wrote:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Its loveliness will never pass into nothingness….”

Thank you Len Terry for giving us such things of beauty as your automotive creations!

Very sad news. I only got to know Len about five years ago after visiting him at his home to interview him in connection with something I was writing at the time. He was certainly a charming host but his ability to be blunt & to the point – something that ruffled a few feathers during his career – still shone through!

His was indeed a remarkable career & as others have mentioned, he was associated with some of the most elegant Grand Prix cars of all time.

Something that has not been mentioned is the fact that he was a competitive cyclist, only giving up that sport due to a knee injury shortly before I met him, by which time he was into his eighties!

proof that you do not need years at university and a fancy degree to be a success.

“Proof” that that was the case for one talented, hard-working man way-back-when.

Nowadays, while it’s certainly possible to spend loads of money and time on economically-uncompetitive university degrees, I believe aggregate data shows that (especially in the USA, w/ our long-gutted manufacturing non-sector), a college degree translates to statistically greater income over the working life.

There are definitely people getting “useless” college degrees (or not finishing their studies at all) saddled w/ debt and financially ruined, who might be better served by apprenticing in the building trades or as boilermaker/welders, for example. Even union-rate plumbers earn better than english lit majors, iirc.

I wonder what it would’ve been like to serve in the RAF in WW2? Or maybe design a Spitfire, or some Schneider Trophy winners before that? Did ol’ RJ have an engineering qualification from uni or not? Hmm, I don’t remember from Leslie Howard’s playing RJ in that great movie if he did??!

Yet a good – I mean a really good – liberal arts education as an undergrad is often the curriculum of study for the children of the ultra-wealthy at the ivy schools…kids who will still presumably want to be successful themselves and so succeed at some profession (though I’d like the security of still being a trust-fund baby).

Accepted wisdom though is we want to raise children who are as well and roundly-educated as possible, no? (and smart enough by the time they graduate high school to understand the potential value of lack thereof of what course of university study they might indebt themselves for). I was lucky to have had basically a full scholarship to a fantastic school (at the time).

If I gave birth to a kid who grew up to be a soldier or a welder I wouldn’t be too hard on the lad! lol. just rambling now.

Wise words from Other John about esteeming qualifications over application

A couple of years ago the senior people in my department were signing-off a job advert for graduate hires. We realised that 75% of us wouldn’t fit the bill….. Of course the world has changed since were were 21, but there have been losses as well as wins.

Apart from the sad loss of another great designer, two things leap out at me:
Firstly he would have done everything on the drawing board, as when I started. in the 60s, there were no computers, no calculators, apart from clumsy comptometers and later motorised mechanical calculating machines. (one would take 5 minutes to do a long division) Most work would have been done with slide rules, logs and trig tables. Tables of mechanical properties, the “Scottish Bilble” as it was known (Machinery’s Handbook) Tables of steel stock sizes weights shear strengths etc. But of course there was no aero so it was a lot simpler.

Secondly the RAF (and no doubt the other services) were responsible for shaping much of British industry following the war, they trained tens of thousands of navigators radio operators and radar technicians. Almost all of the staff at Philips in my division were ex-RAF. We even had one of the secret radar developers up the corridor. (Ironically he had been caught speeding by the police with their new radar equipment, which was then coffin sized, and had to be set at a particular angle and distance to the traffic flow to be measured. He plunged into his defence but was hampered by the fact that no one in the court could understand radar and most of what he knew was still top secret.)
But our industries were then full of trained engineers, designers, draughtsmen all courtesy of the forces. As a “boomer” I missed the war but had the privilege of working with some of the survivors, all ex RAF.

Yes, I have that book in my collection. It’s interesting to reference that book and see how design has changed so much over the years. Len Terry sort of carries the reader through his basic design process and thought flow and how he gets to where he thinks the car should be.

len was born on Feb 11th, 1924. i was proud and honored to have him call me his friend for over 32 years, from the time i bought my first Terrier formula junior. he gave me lots of advice on correcting the handling of my Terrier Mk6 and setting up the Leda LT25. i run a Terrier Mk2 as a road car. a great man has left us, let us preserve his cars for future generations.

Sorry to be picky, but there is something not quite right about the chronology of this story. Nobody was building Formula Junior cars in the mid-fifties. The Moorland first appeared in 1959. The Delta dates from 1959-1960. Presumably the Terrier cars predate the FJ cars? RGDS RLT